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There have been many empirical studies on humor styles and humor comprehension and appreciation, but relatively few have directly addressed the relationship between these two topics of humor research, especially studies using a typological approach for humor styles. Therefore, the present study aimed to examine how humor styles are associated with humor comprehension and appreciation using a typological approach. The present study collected the responses of humor styles questionnaires that included ratings of comprehension and funniness of humorous pictures for 962 high school students in Taiwan. The cluster analysis result indicated that there were four humor types of participants: general humor endorsers, humor deniers, positive humor endorsers, and negative humor endorsers. The positive humor endorsers could understand the content of humor pictures better than other types of participants. The general humor endorsers found the humor pictures much funnier than the humor deniers. These findings indicate that humor styles have different associations with humor comprehension and humor appreciation., Author(s): Ching-Lin Wu [sup.1] [sup.2] , Ying-Fan Yen [sup.3] , Hsueh-Chih Chen [sup.3] [sup.2] [sup.4] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.412090.e, 0000 0001 2158 7670, Program of Learning Sciences, National Taiwan Normal [...]

A sense of humor constitutes a core factor that influences teacher-student interactions. The humor that teachers utilize in class may influence teacher-student relationships, either positively or negatively. Moreover, teachers' humor style influences students' humor style, and vice versa. This study aimed to construct patterns of humor styles based on typology and explore how these patterns influence their interactions. Data were collected from 990 Taiwanese students regarding their self-reported humor styles and perceptions of class teachers as well as the interaction between the two. Subsequently, k-means clustering was conducted by dividing participants into four clusters based on the collected data: positive humor endorsers, negative humor endorsers, humor deniers, and contradictory humor endorsers. Among these, the grouping of contradictory humor endorsers differed from previous findings. Among the four clusters, the teachers of positive humor endorsers were perceived to have a significantly higher influence and proximity to students, whereas contradictory humor endorsers were perceived to have the lowest influence and proximity to students. The research findings revealed that different patterns of teachers' and students' humor styles have a distinct influence on their interactions, which deepens our understanding of the extent to which their humor styles consistently impact their interactions., Author(s): Ching-Lin Wu [sup.1] [sup.2] , Hsiang-Ju Huang [sup.3] , Pei-Zhen Chen [sup.3] , Hsueh-Chih Chen [sup.2] [sup.3] [sup.4] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.412090.e, 0000 0001 2158 7670, Program of Learning [...]

This study is one of the first to employ an online interactive creativity task platform to explore one's creativity performance in a paired-player mode. It analyzed the differences between 342 participants' performances in single- and paired-player modes on two creativity tests: The Alternative Uses Task (AUT) and Chinese Radical Remote Associates Test (CRRAT). Potential factors affecting performance in the paired-player mode were summarized based on participants' responses to the AUT and CRRAT to analyze the correlation between the factors and creativity performance. Results showed that playing the AUT or CRRAT, low scorers can improve fluency, flexibility, originality, and performance by referring to response category or another participant's answer, closing the gap between their score and that of the high scorers. These results reveal both the similarities and differences of creativity performance on the two tests in an interactive situation and the correlation between response strategies and creativity performance in the paired-player mode. This study utilized online standardized measurement tools to explore how two persons cooperate in creativity tests to reveal that creativity performance may vary between tasks.

Remote association, the ability to form new relations between independent elements, was assessed using the Remote Associates Test (RAT). The Chinese RAT (CRAT) includes the Chinese radical RAT (CRRAT), Chinese word RAT (CWRAT), and Chinese compound RAT (CCRAT). Behavioral research indicates that an individual's performance on the CRAT reflects different ways of remote associations, although there are few studies on brain networks. Therefore, this study analyzed the correlation between structural network connectivity and CRAT performance in 52 adults. The findings showed that CCRAT performance had a positive correlation with clustering coefficients, local efficiency, and global efficiency, but a negative correlation with the characteristic path length. CWRAT performance was positively correlated with normalized clustering coefficients and small-world-ness, and CRRAT performance was positively correlated with characteristic path length. This study enriches our understanding of the process of remote association by exploring different remote associations from a brain network perspective.

The Remote Associates Test, generally used in creativity research, has Chinese versions for the three levels of "radical-word-vocabulary." However, research has not been conducted on the influence of the item components on the difficulties among these Chinese Remote Associates Tests (CRATs). The present study selected six item components from the construction rules for three versions of CRATs, collected 555 participants' responses to them, and analyzed the differences and similarities in the predictions of item difficulty among the six item components. The results show that item difficulty decreased if the targets are high-frequency or the stimuli are low-frequency words, but item difficulty increases if the stimulus can connect to more words, while the concreteness of the target does not significantly predict item difficulty. Moreover, the concreteness of the stimulus negatively predicts the difficulty of the CRRAT but positively predicts the difficulty of the CCRAT High association transfer increased the difficulty of the CWRAT but had no influence on the other two versions of CRAT. Therefore, these findings indicate the different influences of item components on item difficulty, strengthen the structural validity of the test, and also provide a reference for test development of the CRAT.

An increasing number of studies have explored the process of how subjects solve problems through remote association. Most research has investigated the relationship between an individual's response to semantic search during the think-aloud operation and the individual's reply performance. Few studies, however, have examined the process of obtaining objective physiological indices. Eye-tracking technology is a powerful tool with which to dissect the process of problem solving, with tracked fixation indices that reflect an individual's internal cognitive mechanisms. This study, based on participants' fixation order for various stimulus words, was the first to introduce the concept of association search span, a concept that can be further divided into distributed association and centralized association. This study recorded 62 participants' eye movement indices in an eye-tracking experiment. The results showed that participants with higher remote association ability used more distributed associations and fewer centralized associations. The results indicated that the stronger remote association ability a participant has, the more likely that participant is to form associations with different stimulus words. It was also found that flexible thinking plays a vital role in the generation of remote associations.

The impact of caffeine and glucose supplementation in a hypoxic environment on endurance exercise performance remains inconclusive. The current study examined the effect of pre-exercise carbohydrate and caffeine supplementation on endurance exercise performance in an acute hypoxic environment. Eight healthy active young males participated in this double-blind, within-subjects crossover study. Participants ingested the test drink 60 min before exercising at 50% Wmax for 90 min on a cycle ergometer (fatiguing preload); there followed an endurance performance test at 85% Wmax until exhaustion in a hypoxic chamber (~15%O2). Participants completed four experimental trials in a randomized order: caffeine (6 mg·kg−1; Caff), glucose (1 g·kg−1; CHO), caffeine (6 mg·kg−1) + glucose (1 g·kg−1; Caff−CHO), and taste- and color-matched placebo with no caffeine or CHO (PLA). Blood samples were collected during fasting, pre-exercise, every 30 min throughout the exercise, and immediately after exhaustion. The caffeine and glucose trials significantly enhanced endurance capacity in hypoxic conditions by Caff, 44% (68.8–31.5%, 95% confidence interval), CHO, 31% (44.7–15.6%), and Caff−CHO, 46% (79.1–13.2%). Plasma-free fatty-acid and glycerol concentrations were higher in Caff and PLA than in CHO and Caff−CHO (p < 0.05). The estimated rate of fat oxidation was higher in Caff and PLA than in CHO and Caff−CHO (p < 0.05). There were no significant differences in ratings of perceived exertion between trials. In conclusion, the ingestion of caffeine, glucose, or caffeine + glucose one hour before exercising in hypoxic conditions significantly improved 85% Wmax endurance performance after prolonged exercise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Chinese Radical Assembly Game (CRAG) is an online platform that assesses the lexical competence. In which, individuals select different Chinese radicals to combine them and form a legitimate character. This concept is similar to that of creative synthesis. Therefore, this study aimed to examine whether the CRAG response process involves creativity through eye-tracking technologies and behavior scales. In Experiment 1, the eye movements of 40 participants in the CRAG process were tracked with an eye tracker, after which the average fixation duration (AFD) and average fixation count (AFC) were calculated. Additionally, we analyzed the correlation among AFD, AFC and participants' radical assembly performance. In Experiment 2, 75 participants of CRAG and the Chinese Remote Associates Test (CRAT) were collected to analyze the correlation between their CRAG and CRAT performance. The results indicate that individuals' saccades of different Chinese radicals per unit of time contributed to the accuracy of radical combination. Long fixation durations on certain Chinese radicals reduced the accuracy of radical combinations. The accuracy rates of the CRAG and CRAT correlated positively. This study presents the cognitive process in the CRAG based on implicit and explicit evidence.

Humour processing is complex and may be influenced by an individual's emotional state. This study explores the differences in incongruity‐resolution and nonsense joke humour processing between three groups with different emotional states (positive, neutral and negative). Each group consisted of 32 participants. The positive and negative emotion groups were asked to elicit positive and negative emotions, respectively, through autobiographical recall. In contrast, the neutral emotion group was asked to answer questions unrelated to emotions. Participants were also asked to rate their emotional valence, arousal and conformity with the provided emotion words. Subsequently, they were directed to rate their humour appreciation, humour comprehension and level of surprise at the jokes. The results indicate that these variables interacted with the level of amusement derived from the two humour types. The positive emotion group perceived nonsense jokes as funnier than the negative emotion group, while the negative emotion group perceived nonsense jokes as less amusing than incongruity‐resolution jokes. No significant difference was found between the three emotion groups in terms of humour comprehension and surprise at the jokes. The results deepen the understanding of the correlation between emotional states and processing of different humour types. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both creativity and humor are high-level cognitive functions and complex concepts. Although creativity and humor are generally deemed positively correlated, it has been difficult to explicitly identify their relationship with each other. The cognitive process of creativity includes divergent thinking, insight, and remote association, whereas humor comprehension includes incongruity resolution and nonsense humor. The difference between the 2 types of humor is in whether individuals can understand the content of jokes through logical deduction. This study explored the relationship of the different dimensions of cognitive creativity and incongruity-resolution and nonsense humor comprehension. Furthermore, we examined the influence of divergent thinking, insight, and remote association on incongruity-resolution and nonsense humor comprehension. The scores from 103 participants on a divergent thinking questionnaire, an insight problem-solving task, and the Chinese compound remote associate problems test were used to analyze their comprehension of incongruity resolution and nonsense humor. The results showed a positive correlation between remote association and incongruity-resolution humor comprehension, as well as a positive correlation between insight and nonsense humor comprehension. These findings indicate that each dimension of cognitive creativity has a particular way of connecting to various types of humor comprehension.

The association of different networks in the human brain with creativity has received increasing attention as an active research topic. Creativity is a multidimensional concept reflecting different cognitive processes and associations mediated by the brain network. In this study, we first identified connections between the topological properties of the white matter network and divergent thinking and insight problem solving. Then, we performed a graph-theoretical analysis to calculate the efficiency of the brain network and to predict divergent thinking and insight-based problem solving. We found that effective information transmission across brain regions was significantly correlated with creative problem solving. Divergent thinking requires few connections between brain regions to produce novel ideas, whereas insight problem solving requires simultaneous processing by more brain regions to restructure the presentation of the problem. The results show that the integrated efficiency of the brain network varies between open- and closed-ended creative problem solving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]